Snowriders have always been among the first adaptors of new technologies, from the composite materials used in new skis, snowboards, and boots to the HD cams strapped to just about every helmet on the hill. As ski resorts add cellular and Wi-Fi connectivity to their peaks, lodges and lifts, schussers are increasingly turning to their smartphones to plan, track, improve, and immortalize their turns. This winter, app developers have responded with a new crop offering something for all shredders, whether you’re bombing the backcountry or racing gates. Before you head out to one of our picks for North America's best ski resorts and hotels, download these 12 must-have apps.

Mother Nature can be a fickle mistress, bestowing feet of powder on one ski hill but just a few inches at another resort down the road. With Ski and Snow Report by the Zumobi Network, you can wake up and know exactly how much snow fell where. This winter the app adds social network integration, allowing you to clue your friends into the forecast via Facebook and Twitter, and its push notifications use your phone’s GPS to inform you of conditions (snowfall over the past 72 hours, depth at the base and top of the mountain and trails open) at resorts near you. Don’t worry, you can easily turn notifications off for those days when you’re stuck behind the desk and don’t want to know you’re missing out on freshies. (Free, iOS and Android)

If you’re resort hopping or starting your ski trip in a gateway metropolis (Denver, Salt Lake City, or Vancouver, say), there’s a good chance you’re going to encounter some traffic on your way to the hill. You can take a risk on the local radio stations’ traffic reports, put your faith in those red lines on Google Maps, or you can harness the power of the snowriding masses with Waze. This innovative GPS-based community-traffic and navigation app connects local commuters, allowing the crowd to alert you to traffic jams, accidents or weather-related closures between you and your shred. And thanks to Waze’s community-edited maps, travelers are instantly put in the know about local shortcuts, secondary routes, and important intel—like speed traps. (Free; iOS, Android, Windows, BlackBerry)

Vail Resorts (which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year) broke trail in the digitization of the ski hill, integrating RFID technology in passes and lifts with its EpicMix app. Every time you get on a lift at any of the company’s seven resorts (Vail, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge and Keystone in Colorado and Heavenly, Northstar-at-Tahoe and Kirkwood in California) the RFID chip in your pass is scanned, tracking the trails and vertical feet you skied. That data is used to award pins for your accomplishments—like the VailCreek pin earned by skiing Vail and Beaver Creek in the same day, or the Everest pin earned by riding 29,035 vertical feet in one day. Pins, of course, are easily shared on Facebook and Twitter and they can even earn you prizes at the end of the year. The program also adds a photo element: Photographers strategically stationed on the mountain snap your picture and scan your pass, and a low-resolution inmage automatically posts on your Facebook; if you like it you can buy a high resolution version later. (Free, iOS and Android)

Yes, this is technically part of Vail Resorts’ EpicMix app, but the new racing component appeals to a whole different type of snowrider: the speed demon. Vail Resorts teamed up with Gold Medalist and World Cup champ Lindsey Vonn for this program that lets you race on courses at six of the company's seven ski areas (sorry Kirkwood fans) and track your time via your RFID-enabled pass and EpicMix. Vonn set a pace time at the beginning of the season and racers will earn gold, silver, and bronze medals for their times (adjusted for age and gender). Think you’re fast enough to hang with Vonn? Top finishers for the season will be invited for an end-of-season race with Lindsey on the lower portion of Beaver Creek's World Cup Birds of Prey racecourse to determine the winner of the inaugural Lindsey Vonn Race Series. (Free, iOS and Android)

Your phone’s GPS doesn’t just tell you where you are, it can also track where you’ve been without data or cell signals. Ski Tracks uses that GPS (and some magic algorithms) to not only map where you ride, but also calculate your speed, slope angle, and vertical feet skied along the way. This app really couldn’t be simpler: Open it when you get to the resort and let it run while you carve the day away. Because it runs in the background you can still make calls, text, or use other apps, and it requires very little power (there’s even a function that turns the app off when your battery reaches 20 percent). Stop to take pictures and the app geo-tags them for you; at the end of the day you can upload the data and those images to Google Earth for a comprehensive view of your day on the mountain. (99¢, iOS and Android)

The ski industry is among the greenest in the travel game, but there’s one aspect of a day on the mountain that remains decidedly old-school: the paper ski map. Save a tree and download** iTrailMap** or iTrailMap 3D to put trail maps of more than 750 resorts worldwide in the palm of your hand. Before you start your day, download the map for your resort; you can view it like you would the old paper map, or with the 3-D app you can use your GPS to show you where you are on a map that you can pan, zoom, and rotate. (iTrailMap: free, iOS and Android; iTrailMap3D: $4.99, iOS only)

Augmented Reality is useful for more than figuring out where the nearest subway station or Starbucks is in the big city. REALSKI utilizes your camera, compass, accelerometer, and GPS to overlay ski runs, lifts, lodges, warm-up huts, and other resort features on your screen. Come to a fork in the trail? Look through your phone to figure out which path leads to the double black diamond of death and which leads to the green cruiser back to the base-area bar. Not sure what lift that is over there? Just look through your phone and the name pops up right above it. It works at some 100 North American resorts and you can even customize the tags that appear in your viewfinder by geotagging that secret pow stash in the trees or that little cliff huck in the sidecountry. And don’t forget to geotag your car so you don’t spend the end of the day wandering around the lot looking for it at the end of the day. (Free, iOS)

Once you’ve mastered the resort and passed an avalanche safety course it’s time to venture out into the backcountry in search of your untracked powder paradise. Bring along Ullr’s Mobile Avalanche Safety Tools and you’ll have a veritable backcountry textbook at your fingertips. Using your camera, GPS, inclinometer, and compass, this app is an interactive field notebook that helps you measure slope angles, create snowpit profiles, and test for signs of snowpack instability. It will also warn you if your observations are outside of safe ranges, and you can share your data with regional avalanche centers to create a skier-generated backcountry database that will help other shredders stay safe. ($9.99, iOS and Android)

Nothing, and we mean nothing, can replace an avalanche beacon, and you should wear one at all times in the backcountry and even when riding certain resorts' sidecountry terrain. That said, it couldn’t hurt to have a backup like the new SnoWhere app, which uses GPS to turn your phone into a beacon that other SnoWhere users can track. Even if you’re staying inbounds this app is a nice safety net; if you injure yourself or loose a ski, the app will also allow you to send a SMS alert through the GPS even if you have no bars. ($9.99, iOS)

Sure, we’ve told you about the best new touchscreen-friendly ski gloves, but that doesn’t mean tap, tap, tapping is always the most efficient way to use your phone. Case in point: photos. With our without gloves, shaky hands and clumsy controls all too often result in blurred shots or poorly timed smiles. Enter vapp, which turns your phone into a voice-activated camera. You set the trigger level with your voice and vapp snaps your pic when you say…whatever you want. Amazingly, it’s able to detect your voice when there’s background noise, and it even flickers the flash after it has taken your picture so that you know when the image is in without flipping your phone around to look at the screen. (Free, iOS)

So you got one of those spiffy new helmet cams—the Countour+2 or the GoPro Hero3—to capture your shred in all its glory. Don’t just strap the thing on your head, push record, and hope for the best…because, trust us, you’ll end up with the lens pointing too high or too low and hours of useless footage. Both of these new cams have built-in Bluetooth capabilities that when paired with their respective apps—Contour Connect and Go Pro App—turn your phone into a viewfinder and remote control for your camera. _(Contour Connect: free, iOS and Android; GoPro App: free, iOS and Android)